The Revolving Door of Nurse Recruitment

Nursing is the most in-demand career in the United States. As healthcare regulation is shifting and Baby Boomers are maturing, finding nurses who are qualified, available and engaged has never been more important – especially for the home health care sector.

It is projected by the Federal Bureau of Labor that over the next seven years we can expect about 1.3 million additional jobs within the homecare field. Home health care is the fastest growing industry in the United States and the costs of recruitment are skyrocketing with each new case added.

Before recruiters rush out into the field to sell nursing degrees to the masses, the broken nurse recruitment and retention funnel must be fixed. According to internal surveys of our home health care clients, an average of $1500 is spent on recruitment, per nurse. Even for nurses that are already employed by the company. Wait. What?

Nurse Recruitment Dejavu

Most health care providers are re-hiring their entire workforce of nurses and caregivers every two years. Providers and agencies are hunting for a workforce they have already paid the price to attract, spent the time to vett, and invested precious time on the tedious process of onboarding. This is surely contributing to the increase in costs for Home Care, which is rising at 3 times the rate of inflation, and not slowing down anytime soon.

Over 45% of each recruitment dollar spent is being attributed to replacements for nurses that have dis-engaged. They are still qualified, have been onboarded, and are probably still practicing their trade, they’re just doing it elsewhere. The inefficiencies of engagement are driving the high churn rate and ultimately the recruitment costs for home health care organizations. Without a meaningful way to connect with their already qualified nurse-force, home health organizations are left no option but blanket re-targeting.

Some Nurse-force Math

Current data shows that out of 100 nurses that apply for employment at a home health agency, only 2 or 3 will complete the entire onboarding process to complete even one visit. With a 2% conversion rate for active job seekers in nursing, the more prevalent passive nursing job seekers are carrying an even lower conversion rate.

For a workforce that is the most in-demand in the country, they face a tremendous amounts of red-tape, stop and go, phone tag and broken processes when onboarding with a health care organization. The same nurses, much like the booming ride-share drivers, are registering with multiple homecare organizations and are only taking on visits that suit their needs, location, and pay expectations. Matching the right nurse to the right visit with so many unfilled visits in the system is inefficiently dependent on an olympic-level phone tag system. This leaves many nurses frustrated, burnt-out, and reverting to competitors who can fill their timesheets in-the-moment – which can only be accomplished at scale with the right technology.

As personal as phone call may be, it’s not scalable, and the lifetime value of a nurse is dwindling as demand is growing. The inefficiencies of these old, manual systems are squeezing out the vigor and commitment needed of the home health workforce.

Without the right platform to re-engage these already qualified, vetted and working nurses, health care agencies are having to turn to the general targeted capabilities of traditional digital advertising. Facebook and Google’s ad targeting, although fine-tuned, is a wasteful venture for organizations who are actually re-targeting their existing workforce.

Empowering your MVNs (Most Valuable Nurses)

The MVNs need to be taken off the bench and into the field, where they belong. Technology is building bridges between the unfilled visits of patients that need care and the qualified nurse-force ready and waiting to serve them. Traditional communication channels are creating barriers to the efficient and immediate care that patients need. With a mobile, on-demand solution, our platform is connecting nurses with the open visits that desperately need to be filled. By letting technology do the heavy clerical lifting, nurses and their CSMs can spend their time focusing on what matters, the millions of Americans who need care at home.

Want a first-hand look of our new, unreleased recruiting platform?

Share the love:

About The Author:

Assaf Shalvi, CEO and Founder of Swift Shift, is an entrepreneur passionate about creating infrastructure to empower labor force sectors on the low end of the earning scale. Prior to launching Swift Shift, Shalvi built Jobinasecond.com, an employee marketplace platform, and worked for MAXIMUS, where he assisted governments in upgrading and streamlining workforce participation programs and policies.